History
The first ship to be described by The New York Times as a supercarrier was HMS Ark Royal in 1938; with a length of 685 ft and a displacement of 22,000 tons, it was designed to carry 72 aircraft. In 1943, the superlative was transferred to the 45,000-ton carriers of the Midway class as a step-up from the 27,000-ton Essex class. The post-war standard for supercarriers was set by the proposed USS United States and USS Forrestal.
Forrestal displaced 60,000 tons standard and 78,000 tons in deep load and is considered the first operational supercarrier in the present-day sense, as dubbed by the American press. The similarly-sized United States would have been in service earlier, had it been completed; its cancellation triggered the "Revolt of the Admirals".
The Soviet Union's 85,000-ton nuclear carrier Ulyanovsk, closely comparable in size to earlier American supercarriers, was 40% complete when it and a follow-on vessel were canceled in 1991 during post-Cold War funding cuts.
The United States is no longer alone in building supercarriers, with the United Kingdom building two 65,600-ton carriers Queen Elizabeth class, and France considering building one vessel, possibly based on the same design. These ships are routinely referred to as supercarriers by British legislators and the media. The two Queen Elizabeth-class vessels will provide the Royal Navy with capabilities much closer to United States Navy carriers than its current Invincible-class vessels. Giving evidence to the House of Commons Defence Committee, the then First Sea Lord Admiral Sir Alan West explained that interoperability with the United States Navy was as much a deciding factor of the size of the carriers as the firepower of the carrier's airwing:
I have talked with the CNO (Chief of Naval Operations) in America. He is very keen for us to get these because he sees us slotting in with his carrier groups. He really wants us to have these, but he wants us to have the same sort of clout as one of their carriers.
Future plans for supercarriers in the United States involve the construction of the U.S. Navy's next generation of carriers, the Gerald R. Ford class, which will have a 100,000 ton displacement.
Read more about this topic: Supercarrier
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